Microsoft CRM Statement of Direction
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Microsoft has delivered significant innovation and value in
customer relationship management (CRM) software with the recent
release of Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2011, a flexible CRM solution
that provides the power of productivity through familiar,
intelligent, and connected experiences for organizations of all
sizes worldwide. This Statement of Direction (SoD) outlines the
future direction of Microsoft Dynamics CRM over the short and
longer term.
The mission of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is to deliver intelligent
software and services that enable extraordinary customer
relationships with world-class business results. Looking forward,
we will continue to support that mission by delivering on our
"dynamic business" vision, as described in the October 2010
whitepaper Microsoft Dynamics: Making Business Dynamic. The
whitepaper outlines the challenges facing today‟s organizations,
and provides insight into how Microsoft Dynamics approaches
delivering solutions that enable organizations to:
Maximize the productivity of their people
Achieve process agility to quickly adapt to new requirements
Encourage connections across an entire ecosystem of suppliers,
partners and customers
Our focus on people, process, and ecosystem reflects our core
philosophy that success starts with your people and that business
applications should be enablers - detecting trends, facilitating
decisions and proactively driving change into practice to help your
organization thrive and win. With upcoming releases of Microsoft
Dynamics CRM, we will continue to put our philosophy into action
with enhanced experiences that promote end-user productivity and
demonstrate the rich, "better together" value of Microsoft
technologies. We also expect to provide new experiences and
capabilities that help customers and partners get the most value
from key emerging trends such as cloud computing, mobility, and
social technologies.
We will continue to focus on rapid, but substantive, innovation
that leverages Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the easiest and fastest
way to experience the full benefits of Microsoft technology for
your organization. Additionally, we remain committed to sustaining
the "Power of Choice‟ and the ability to transition between
cloud-based and on-premises delivery of CRM as a key point of
customer value and flexibility.
TRANSFORMING BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS AND
PRODUCTIVITY
Dynamic Businesses understand that the delivery of world-class
customer experiences provides a sustainable competitive advantage
for their products and services. At the same time, customer
expectations and technologies are always evolving, making it
difficult for organizations to keep up. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM
team has identified the following customer relationship and
engagement trends to guide our application and platform investments
for the next set of product releases.
SOCIAL COLLABORATION AND ENGAGEMENT
People are the heart of any organization whether they are
employees, prospects, customers or partners. Emerging social
technologies provide people-centric experiences that can
fundamentally impact how people and organizations communicate and
collaborate across internal and external communities. While these
social technologies can provide additional channels for customers
and organizations to interact, or improve and simplify
collaboration within an organization, it can be challenging for
organizations to internalize how to use them for maximum value.
Microsoft has significant collaboration assets and is continuing to
extend those capabilities across a number of products including
Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Lync, and Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM will harness and surface these broader
Microsoft investments as part of specific new experiences that
facilitate direct customer engagement and clear business value. We
will deliver an innovative new experience in this area, while
supporting some common capabilities such as:
Micro-blogging: encompassing important status updates and
notifications regarding business events and actions.
Business activity feeds: delivering configurable real-time
notifications regarding important relationships and significant
business events.
Social intelligence: identification of data patterns and streams
to enhance customer service and marketing decision-making.
DERIVING RAPID VALUE FROM BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
Organizations need to respond immediately to change in order to
optimize their potential. In the past, business applications have
been too rigid and too complex to adapt and accommodate change.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes the powerful xRM application
framework to facilitate the delivery of rapid business value with
an agile solution framework that can be easily tailored and
configured. We will continue to invest in capabilities that drive
faster attainment of business value for both organizations and
individuals. Some examples of these capabilities will include:
Sales and marketing productivity: provide sales and marketing
professionals with insights to prioritize actions that lead to
closing more deals in a shorter timeframe and streamline the
creation of important deliverables required during the sales cycle
such as proposals and presentations.
Service productivity: optimize service planning, collaboration,
multi-channel engagement, knowledge management and agent
productivity to turn customers into fans.
Enhanced evaluation process: enable rapid provisioning and
evaluation of relevant solutions and extensions from the Microsoft
Dynamics Marketplace.
Reduced effort to deploy: enhanced tools and configuration
capabilities to shorten the time and investment required to deploy
and tailor Microsoft Dynamics CRM so that it accurately reflects
the business it serves.
Emphasis on business adoption: delivering an experience where
users can recognize value, opportunity and insight immediately. As
users spend more time in Microsoft Dynamics CRM they derive
proportionally more value, insight and productivity.
OPTIMIZING BUSINESS DECISION-MAKING
Business professionals need to become more productive in order to
achieve their desired performance levels. As such, they are
constantly trying to evaluate which actions will drive successful
business outcomes. Built on Microsoft‟s business intelligence (BI)
platform, Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers will natively benefit
from new platform and data consumption innovations enabled.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM will invest in additional proactive and
insightful intelligence capabilities. Some examples of these
capabilities will include:
Extended self-service BI: enhanced tools that build on the
investments in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to enable users to
create and share their own business reports and analysis solutions
without requiring additional IT support.
Enhanced data visualizations: additional business charts and
enriched real-time analytic dashboards enabled through enhanced
design tools.
Improved decision-making: new data analysis capabilities to unlock
data patterns and trends to facilitate better business
decisions.
CONSUMERIZATION OF BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
Users have ever-increasing expectations around how they access
systems and information through new generations of devices and
form-factors (e.g. desktop PC, laptop, tablet and phone) to provide
anytime, anywhere access to information, processes and people.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM will invest in capabilities that deliver
familiar and compelling experiences in how users access and
interact with the system. Some examples of these capabilities will
include:
CRM anywhere: deliver immersive user experiences that match
users' particular context or work "mode" - whether that is on the
road or in the office. This facilitates a new agility and
productivity in how users respond to different situational
requirements.
Cross-device: provide device-specific application experiences that
are natural and intuitive across a range of platforms and
form-factors.
Multi-browser: provide targeted user experiences that work on
different web browsers by utilizing HTML5 for structuring and
presenting content.
EXTENDED SOLUTION OPPORTUNITIES AND ECOSYSTEMS
Organizations have high expectations around the flexibility of
modern business applications to meet and evolve with their specific
business requirements. Organizations seek confidence that an
ecosystem of skilled people and organizations is in place to
provide expertise, solutions and extensions to their business
application. This Microsoft Dynamics CRM - Statement of Direction,
May 2011 ecosystem needs to cater for different organization sizes
and industries with solutions that run both in the cloud and
on-premises. Microsoft will continue to invest in capabilities and
programs that connect customers with targeted solutions and
accelerate Microsoft and our partners in rapidly developing new
solutions.
Some examples of these capabilities include:
Familiar and trusted: harness the industry-standard Microsoft
technology platform to ensure consistency and familiarity in the
way organizations deploy, manage and extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Your organization can depend on Microsoft to deliver enterprise
class software and services that drive business success.
Enterprise cloud transformation: enable larger organizations to
utilize Dynamics CRM Online and the larger suite of Microsoft's
Online Services as part of their extended IT infrastructure,
through streamlined on-boarding, IT-focused administration, and
seamless integration capabilities.
Development tools and Application Lifecycle: streamlining the
development experience for Microsoft, partners and customers to
simplify and accelerate development of extended CRM solutions using
the xRM application framework.
Seamless Solution Marketplace: enable new scenarios that make the
process of finding, evaluating, deploying and rating solutions on
the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace seamless through the entire
solution lifecycle.
Microsoft
Dynamics CRM | Microsoft CRM 2011 | Microsoft CRM
Online | Microsoft CRM Sales | Microsoft
CRM Marketing | Microsoft CRM Service | Microsoft CRM
Outlook | Microsoft CRM Mobile | Microsoft CRM
Demo | Microsoft CRM
Whitepapers | Microsoft CRM
Statement of Direction | Microsoft CRM Accelerators |
Microsoft CRM
Services | Microsoft CRM Integration